Acknowledgments
Writing is ancestor work.
I offer a jar of honey, a fistful of flowers, a fifth of whiskey, and a deep breath to each soul who lived through the Middle Passage and its wake. You fought, cried, struggled, gave up, grieved, laughed, loved, and survived the unsurvivable all up and down this hemisphere. My life, and this book, is an altar to you. The path I walk is lit by the triple gem of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, in whom I take refuge over and over in the service of collective liberation. May all of us who struggle under the weight of structural and personal suffering claim freedom, in this lifetime.
My mother died before this book went to press. She left me so many gifts most of which she offered to the world: a method for reading and writing Black girl truths, a reverence for the erotic and the disrespectable, an abiding contempt for American empire, a practice of multilingual diasporic kinship, a possibility model for making some kind of life out of words. But t here is something else she modeled for me: radical accountability.
Our relationship was so loving, but it was also difficult she came up short in a lot of what I needed from a mother, but she knew that, and surrounded me with a whole village of other mothers, like my aunt Bisa Williams and my godmother Ifa Bayeza; like Ms. Marie and Ms. Denise and Enomoyi. I am so grateful to each of them, and call their names as their maternal labor made my life livable. My mother was radically accountable because she believed me when I said “This is hard.” Never defensive or guilt trippy, she gave me the space I needed to grow and heal. She would call me nto my thirties with a memory of something
she wish could have gone differently, to make amends for something that I had long since processed or forgotten. But it mattered to her, and this is one of the most precious gifts she gave me: her willingness to start over, to be soft in the face of failure, to try again. She kept trying with recovery, with our relationship, with teaching herself how to hold a pen and write again after a series of strokes and the onset of a neurological disorder. for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf ain’t just the title of a play my mother struggled with staying alive, and each day was a kind of win. Even if she wasn’t ever truly happy, she taught me to touch joy. Even if she never really was okay, she taught me that it was worth sticking it out all the same.
She died after traveling for work for ten out of the last fifteen days of her life at seventy years old. At her last gig, she told me she felt abused not because anyone was unkind or rude but because of the brutal schedule. This world just kept taking from her, as she traipsed through a conference hotel with a walker and a wheelchair and congestive heart failure and a hau nted nervous system because there were still poems that needed to be read and rent that needed to be paid. She deserved better than the extractive economy of being a surviving artist, better than a dystopian celebrity culture that doesn’t know how to care for a manic-depressive, selfmedicating Black prophetess. We all do.
She was ecstatic when I signed the contract for Progressive Dystopia, and I was looking forward to sharing page proofs with her, asking her advice on which book cover to go with, even though she would have just said, “It ’s brilliant, I love it! I’m gonna tell everybody that my baby has a book!” I sent in the final manuscript for this book to Duke three days after she died. Her body wasn’t even embalmed yet and I was fiddling with tables and footnotes. This, too, is her legacy: turning to the work when the world gets hard, trying to produce something beautiful enough to be called Black and woman.
Thank you for everything you have given me, Mama, thank you for the legacy of possibility you leave for Harriet and everybody here you did good.
Ntozake Shange, ¡presente!
My father, McArthur, has shown me the incredible human capacity for we have become family anew. Carla Jean has flown in with a cape and tights to save the day many a time, going be-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
yond any expectations of “stepmothering” to be a parent to me. My sister, Stella Rae, is the most deeply honest and self-actualized person I know. Every day you step deeper into your power, and I watch the world changing in ripples around you. My sibling, Lucas Willie, embodies the best of our family’s tradition of deep independence and creativity, and I can’t wait for you to keep passing it on to your niece. My aunt and godmother, Ifa, has been a deep source of spiritual and emotional support, particularly as we both navigated graduate school. My aunt, Bisa, opened her home and heart to me in the roughest years of my life, and I owe both my life and livelihood to her love. My Uncle Paul has been a stalwart source of optimism than k you for keeping me grounded in the work. My “little” cousin Michael has his own condo in the best corner of my heart, and continues to teach me what family means. My mother-in-law, Paula Monford, has welcomed me into her family with so much love, and I am eternally grateful for her support. Jakayla Kam r y, your smile brings me such joy, and I am proud to call you my niece!
Just a month after I started coursework, I answered a Facebook message that blossomed into a lifelong partnership. Kenshata Mignon you are my dharma love, and I thank you for weathering all the torments of this process. You have celebrated every win, big and small, and mourned the losses. I a m forever grateful for our duprass. Together we conjured Harriet Elle Dessalines Sati Shange-Watk ins, the brilliant firechild who teaches me to see the world anew each day. This one’s for you, Big Baby.
Homegirls make the world go round, and without Gina’s dharmic sisterhood, Paris’s Black feminist fire, Dhira’s courage and whimsy, Susie’s nonattached cheerleading, Noor’s en Dless me mes , and Audrey’s unconditional reciprocity, I would have no world at all. Sammy, you are the best homeboy a homegirl could have, and the actual goat in the categories of book manuscript feedback and rap-infu sed grief consolation. My two besties have shown me sisterhood at its finest: Sahar, you have made me better for twenty years, and I can never thank you enough for how much you have changed how I see the world through your art, your parenting, and your friendship. Oriana, you make the whole world golden, and it was your ferocious love for your city that sparked this project to begin with.
I bega n graduate school at Penn with a bfa in my pocket, several years in the field, and no academic training at all. John L. Jackson Jr., aka “JJ,” aka Anthroman, gave me space to be unapologetically Black in the academy, and adopted me into an intellectual lineage of Africana thought and practice. Kathleen D. Hall created a sanctuary of ethical, rigorous, and just practice in an institution that felt more alienating than inviting. I am also deeply
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
indebted to Deborah A. Thomas: you stand as a possibility model for those of us who want to make a life worth living in academia. There is a reason you are cited more times in this book than any other author I would not be able to think with or about the state, our people, or true reparative movement without your mentorship. David O. Stovall, thank you for making a space for those of us who have ten toes down in two worlds your work as a mentor has shaped how I try to support younger scholars.
I have also been blessed by the guidance and material support of incredible feminist mentors. Dána-Ain Davis has been a formidable coconspirator, mentor, and guide through the fruition of this project than k you so much for believing in me. Bianca Williams has been relentless in her enthusiasm for my work, and has consistently looped me into larger conversations and projects, manifesting multiscalar Black feminist ethics on the da ily. Early in my graduate school career, I was fortunate to have the mentorship of A. Lynn Bolles through the Caribbean Studies Association, and her sage insights shaped many of choices thereafter. Margot Weiss has been another rare blessing than k you for allowing me to tag along in adventures at the edges of anthropology. Clyde Woods’ visionary approach to Black geographic praxis capacitates both my career and this project, and he was the first senior scholar to encourage me to publish my work on San Francisco. He became an ancestor far too soon, but because of him I am still Black California Dreamin’.
My academic squad rolls deep, and I could not imagine a more powerful army (better yet, a navy) to navigate the treacherous waters of the academy. Brittany Webb has read more pages of this manuscript than perhaps anyone else, and has provided crucial feedback at every turn. Long before that, she helped me cobble together something like an anthropological training, and I am eternally grateful for her peer mentorship and friendship. Krystal Smalls saw me floundering in an education program, and brought me to the (Black) light of Africana as a joint degree program. I am continually awed with her power as a spiritual and intellectual being, and this project has her magic sprinkled all over. Roseann Liu kept me sane throughout this process by modeling how to balance activist scholarship, parenting, and pedagogy as a woman of color in the academy. Thank you for being a homegirl, a collaborator, and a friend. Keon Monte McGuire is the riding-est, downest antiheteropatriarchal comrade a Black feminist could have. I could not have ived without his humor, perseverance, and ability to speak a divine
I am only the scholar I am because of the comradeship of other scholars
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
invested in justice and transformation. At my very first American Anthropological Association meetings, I met Juli Grigsby and Courtney Morris, and by t he grace of the Lorde they took me in. They have been Black feminist lifelines in this work, and they have been my embodied introduction to the Austin School of Black and diasporic anthropologists trained at ut Austin by Ted Gordon, João Costa Vargas, Simone Browne, Jemima Pierre, Kamala Viswesaran, Jafari Allen, and Charlie Hale. I will never know the source of the blessing, but they, along with Alix Chapman, Damien Sojoyner, and Mohan Ambikaipaker, adopted me into the larger group of anthropolocxs committed to wrecking shop in the discipline. Ashanté Reese has been a stalwart source of sunshine and real talk our accountability sessions have helped me care for my academic, physical, and spiritual selves. Orisanmi Burton is my intellectual brother from another mother, and I am grateful for his political compass as we collectively navigate the rough waters of the academy. Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Ryan Jobson, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Christien Tompkins, and Kaya Williams each are guaranteed to come through with the assist at the buzzer mad respect.
This project was only possible with the material support of funders whose generosity allowed me to feed myself and my family as I wrestled with fieldwork, data analysis, and prose. I had the privilege of support from the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Point Foundation, the Fontaine Society, and the sas Di ssertation Completion Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press believed in this book perhaps even before I did, and fundamentally “got it” in a way that supersedes the analytics of publishing in the digital era than k you for supporting me every step of the way. Nina Oteria was also incredibly helpful (and patient!) in managing the editorial process, and I thank her as well as Christi Stanforth and the rest of the fantastic Duke u P team.
T he Anthropology Department at uc Santa Cruz has fundamentally changed my idea of what collegiality can be, and has been an essential support in finishing this project. Jerry Zee and Nidhi Mahajan are the junior facu lty cohort of my dreams, and I am so glad to be on this journey together. Many thanks to Nancy Chen and Megan Moodie for relentlessly advocating on behalf of junior faculty, and to graduate student Kathryn Gougelet, e pedagogical labor made space for me to complete this book while experiencing the shock of grief. The manuscript workshop sponsored by the rtment helped get me out of the weeds and think through the larger
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arc of the project special thanks to Mark Anderson for his commitment to a robust anthropology of race, and to my colleague and Black geographic genius Camilla Hawthorne for pushing me to own up to the spatial arguments buried in the manuscript. The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies prog ram has been a space of institutional fugitivity, and I am full of deep gratitude to Gina Dent, Nick Mitchell, Neda Atanasoski, Christine Hong, and Jenny Kelly for their generosity of spirit inside the machine.
The most formative stage of Progressive Dystopia was enabled by my postdoctoral fellowship in the Black Bodies Seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (rcha). T he faculty seminar was truly the most generative and ambitious intellectual space that I have had the opportunity to step into, largely due to the leadership of Marisa Fuentes and Bayo Hol sey. I had the opportunity to workshop an early version of “Ordinary Departures” at rcha , and I am grateful to all twenty-two pa rticipants as they each helped me to refine the form and content of the book. Both Bayo and Marisa gave crucial feedback at that stage, as did Nelson MaldonadoTorres, Brittney Cooper, Kali Gross, Poe Johnson, and Shannon Eaves.
Roughly 2,826 soy cappuccinos have been consumed during the seven years it took to write this book, and I would not have made it without the camaraderie and steadfastness of dozens of ridiculously skilled service workers. Lauren and the staff at Cherry Coffee in New Orleans kept my life in the swamp swinging, while the Rival Brothers crew celebrated me with free drinks whenever I met a milestone like submitting an article or even finishing a paragraph infin ite gratitude to Courtney, Amy Lauren, and my fellow ca Pa (Creative and Performing Arts High School of Philadelphia) alum and rising pop star Josh Bation. Finally, Oakland shout-outs to Stevie, Sasha, and Zach at the cro Café, and to Mohamed and Moni at Subrosa y’al l shepherded me through the final stages of publication with warmth, grace, and wit. Tipping is anticapitalist praxis!
The young people of San Francisco have taught me everything I know about pedagogy, activism, and what it means to survive the end of the world. Thank you for sharing your home with me, and for allowing me to fight alongside you in the struggle for the future of The City.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter One
#OurLivesMatter
Mapping an Abolitionist Anthropology
Our Lives Matter. Courtesy Marcus Hung, Room 212 Productions.
In the fall of 2014, the website of the Robeson Justice Academy 1 prominently featured an image of two hundred or so mostly brown hands raised in the air, some resolute, some reluctant. The young people were crowded onto a crumbling blacktop basketball court, holding signs that read “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” and “Murder Is Illegal Arrest the Officer.” The whole-school photo shoot was organized by youth leaders with the consent of school sta ff, and taken the week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, refused to charge police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Black 2 teenager Michael Brown. The image is a reflection of the small public high school’s mission to offer culturally responsive, social justice-themed education to low-income youth of color. The walls are emblazoned with graffiti murals reading “Equity” and “Decolonize”; Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon are enshrined in the core curriculum. Nestled in the hills of one of the last working-class neighborhoods in San Francisco, Robeson is the product of a hard-foug ht campaign led by Black, Latinx,3 Asian American and Polynesian parents, students, and educators to open a community-based high school, and thus represents the fruits of collective, multiracial struggle. The photo’s presence as the outsize header on the Robeson website, overlaid with the caption “#OurLivesMatter,” indexes a critical, even combative, relationship between the institution and the carceral state that killed Mike Brown.
However, despite this public stance of opposition to racial bias, the year this photo was taken, Robeson had the district’s highest suspension rate for Black students, as well as far higher rates of disciplinary referrals and expulsions. How, then, do we reconcile Robeson’s exceptionally punitive disciplinary practices with its institutional narratives of social justice and liberation as exceptional? Further, what does a place like Robeson, roundly regarded as a “win” for progressive-left reformers, tell us about who loses when “we” win? How is the “our” of #OurLivesMatter raced, gendered, and classed? Who is disposable in a progressive dystopia, the real-life city of mirrors where diversity is king, settlers keep settling, and slavery never stopped?
By replacing “Black Lives Matter” with “Our Lives Matter,” Robeson discourse uneasily skirts the tension that erupted around the co-opti ng of the hashtag by other marginalized communities, like #BrownLivesMatter and #MuslimLivesMatter.4 When “our lives matter” at multiracial Robeson, blackness is eclipsed by the more equivocal “people of color.” The dissonance within what initially feels like such a liberatory coalitional move is
CHAPTER ONE
sharpened by the signs in the front row held by a series of Latina girls reading, “My generation is next don’t shoot.” The performance of racial analogy is both cathartic and politically strategic. A young Latino man, Alex Nieto, died in the street after he was gunned down by the San Francisco Police Department (sf PD) just weeks before this picture was taken. In part, the young women’s plea represents the blackening of Polynesian and Latinx bodies in a white and Chinese city, and the brutality of dispossession as distributed across inherited axes of racialization. This mode of racial solidarity cannibalizes Black suffering in order to state that their generation is “next,” non-Black people of color have to set Black death in stasis, already a fact, a cautionary tale that might ward off state execution.
Progressive Dystopia attends to the tensions between coalition, antiblackness, and the state by documenting the afterlives of slavery as lived in one corner of San Francisco. The argument of this book turns on the generative antagonism between “our” and “Black” in the mattering of lives. By exa m ining a series of successful progressive reforms, and what they cost Black communities, I critique “winning” as the dominant logic of social justice work. I ask, “Who loses when ‘we’ win?” not so much to expand the “we” of winning to an ever more inclusive list of deserving subjects, but to ask what becomes impossible when we engage in contest as the primary mode of Black politics this i s the differential between revolution and abolition. Revolution seeks to win control of the state and its resources, while abol ition wants to quit playing and raze the stadium of settler-slaver society for good.
I n hi s treatise on the aims and methods of Black studies, Fred Moten argues for the conceptualization of “abolition and reconstruction . . . as ongoing projects animating the study of comparative racialization as well as Black studies, two fields that will be seen as each other’s innermost ends, two fields that will be understood through the claim they make on thei r thinking of and in blackness” (Moten 2008: 1745 – 46). “Reconstruction” here invokes both the postbellum experiment with democracy that was precipitously crushed by de jure racism (Du Bois [1935] 2014) and the leftist recuperation of the state that animates the political imaginary of mainstream ethnic studies and its political corollaries in the movements for imm igrant, racial, and economic justice. Reconstruction is a hue of revolution: it assumes the state is both inevitable and recuperable, and that t ensure that the lofty rhetoric of citizenship is equitably applied across lines of racial and ethnic difference. From the perspective of abo-
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lition, the universalizing rhetoric of the liberal state is itself the problem. Moten positions blackness as the articulable joint between ethnic studies and Black studies, whereby the degree to which either project reaches toward an abolitionist horizon is dependent on its conceptual and material relat ion to blackness.
By splashing the #OurLivesMatter photo on its website, Robeson makes what Moten calls “a claim” on blackness, as does the broader multiracial progressive movement that enlists blackness as a central conceit of peopleof-color politics. But when #OurLivesMatter, it is only in their ourness that Black folks’ lives matter, because they, we, are one of “us.” And yet, as Progressive Dystopia demonstrates, being hurt, being mistrustful, being unapologetically Black can get both students and teachers expelled from “us” because they no longer deserve to be in this special place or be a citizen of this ad hoc polity. Robeson is a small, resistant, progressive, and yet imminently civil society, the meniscus of which is kept taut by the internalized policing required under the regime of carceral progressivism, and punctuated by the spectacle of Black expulsion from its exceptional space.
The lethal distance between “our” and “Black” is particularly instructive at a moment when democratic socialism had reentered mainstream political discourse with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid. From bumper stickers in the school parking lot to zealous Facebook posts, Robeson staff members were vocal about their support of the Sanders candidacy. Though Sanders lost, Black people and people of color were the presumed beneficiaries of a democratic socialist presidency. The presumption fails because Black flesh is always in excess, uncivil, and marked by its incongruity with the progressive project, to which we remain narratively central, and yet materially surplus. Progressivism is fundamentally a reconstructionist politic embedded within liberal logics it aim s to hold the state accountable to its promise of democracy and justice. While the protagonist of progressivism’s political narrative has expanded from the white working class to include the Black underclass and the undocumented Brown migrant, its story is fundamentally a state romance “social justice” means living happily ever after with the antiracist, distributive state. Abolition is a messy breakup with the state rend ing, not reparation. To tease out the incongruities between abolition and progress, centrality and excess, the next section zooms out f rom this snapshot of kids on a foggy hill in Frisco to the broader intellectual topography that shapes this project.
CHAPTER ONE
Ethnography in the Wake: Statecraft and the Afterlife of Slavery
The now-iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture embodied by Robeson students was part of a wave of marches, rebellions, and digitally mediated form s of protest against police brutality across the US. In the city of San Francisco, neighbors rose up in response to the state killings of Jessica Williams, Mario Woods, Luis Góngora Pat, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, and Alex Nieto, while across the Bay Area, the police murders of Stephon Clark, Oscar Grant, and Gary King Jr. sparked rallies and vigils. “Hands up, don’t shoot ” juxtaposes a physical pose of surrender with the palpable presence of communal power: it is at once a plea and a demand, one that challenges the fatal power of the state and its armed agents. While associated with the police killing of Mike Brown, the broader social movement that has coalesced nationally around the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Korryn Gaines, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner extends this demand beyond the spectacle of police killing to include an array of violences wrought by the state. For the Movement for Black Lives (m4bl), a coalition of over forty Black-led organizations,
state violence takes many forms it includes the systemic underinvestment in our communities, the caging of our people, predatory state and corporate practices targeting our neighborhoods, government policies that result in the poisoning of our water and the theft of our land, failing schools that criminalize rather than educate our children, economic prac tices that extract our labor, and wars on our Trans and Queer family that deny them their humanity. (m4bl : 2014)
Articulated by Black activists working in urban centers across the US, including the very neighborhood where Robeson is located, this multi layered depiction of the harms of the state belies any simplistic or unitary approach to the state itself. Each mode of dispossession named herein is at work in the communities of southeast San Francisco: the Hunters Point toxic Superfund site abuts a huge public housing development; extractive urban development schemes have stripped the Fillmore, Mission, and South of Market neighborhoods of their Black, Latinx, and Filipinx economic bases; and Robeson itself has struggled with overpunishing Black students. Instead of thinking about the state as a synonym for “government,” the centered political framework that the-
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orizes the state as a set of practices that exceed any single apparatus or even a collection of them. These practices constitute statecraft, an evidentiary path of power that can be glimpsed ethnographically, even as it fails to cohere the state as an empirical object (much less a subject). Strangely enough for a book about social apocalypse, Progressive Dystopia hopes for the best it is an ethical and intimate portrait of progressive statecraft. My commitment to Black life means I refuse to spectacularize Black abjection. Instead, I center the quotidian state practices that render blackness itself as abjection. By attending to statecraft as a site of Black study, I take up Katherine McKittrick’s urging to develop an analytic that “does something new to the black body dislodging it as the only source of black knowledge (and therefore liberation), while also honoring it as the location through which black anti-colonial praxis emerges” (2017: 99). The web of harm articulated by m4bl is just such an analytic one that Michel-Rolph Trouillot might sketch as an accumulation of state effects, whereby the state’s “materiality resides much less in institutions than in the reworking of processes and relations of power so as to create new spaces for the deployment of power” (2001: 127). Close attention to how progressivism is worked and reworked at Robeson ushers us into a hall of mirrors where, in Sylvia Wynter’s terms, the territory of late liberalism is contorted into the map of social justice (2006, 2014).
“Late liberal,” here, is a modifier that attempts to index the changing global landscape after the collapse of Fordist-Keynesianism, while also calling attention to the continuities between the neoliberal era and the age of globalization ushered in by transatlantic slavery and franchise colonialism.5 Of course, the “late” liberal is animated by the unmodified “liberal.” Forged by what Sylvia Wynter (2001) calls Western ethnoclass Man’s overrepresentation of the human during the Renaissance era in Europe, liberalism and its attendant modes of material provisioning (capitalism, slavery) capacitate the production of blackness through its dysselection from huma nity. For Wynter, the ex-slave archipelago that stretches across the globe from Africa to the Caribbean, and indeed, to San Francisco, has been “made to function, over several centuries, as that of the ultimate embodiment of symbolic deat h as wholly human Others to symbolic life ” (2015: 47). Her figures of Man1 (Homo politicus) and Man2 (Homo oeconomicus) anchor the territory of Black (im)possibility that this project seeks to map. In keeping with this attention to the changing same, the afterlife of slavis a temporal and theoretical frame that sutures statecraft to history, owing shade on the promise of chronological time. Conceptualized by
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Saidiya Hartman as a way to reference how “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that was entrenched years ago,” it includes “skewed life chances, limited access to health a nd education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (2007: 6).6 Like Hartman, “I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (2007: 6) my Black queer body is both research instrument and research subject. Eth nographic practice is one way for us to apprehend “the ways our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, t hough not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery” (Sharpe 2016: 8). Christina Sharpe’s invocation of “the wake” as the structuring temporality of blackness in/as/beyond the violence of slavery allows us to slow down the slippage between “Black Lives Matter” and “Our Lives Matter” so as to more faithfully construct a portrait of the American state in motion. One of the goals of this book is to stage an applied encounter between antiblackness theory (glossed more or less controversially as Afropessimism) and the critical anthropology of the state. Too often, blackness falls out of our frame when engaging late liberal governance, or else becomes subordinated as an exemplar of another phenomenon. Similarly, scholars of antiblackness ritually return to the Black body as a theoretical site, but because they work largely in the fields of English, history, and film studies, we don’t know much about how their interventions map onto blackness as lived and loved on a daily basis across the diaspora.
Toward an Abolitionist Anthropology
In an effort to bring these divergent traditions into ethical relation, I introduce the concept of abolitionist anthropology as one of many possible names for apprehending the necessary conjuncture of antiblackness theory and a critical anthropology of the state. Abolitionist anthropology is one of an unruly brood of intellectual projects descended from the “decolonizing generation” christened by Jafari Allen and Ryan Jobson (2016). They use the term to refer to the wave of Black and allied anthropologists working in the 1980s and 1990s to forge an epistemological and methodological path toward an “anthropology for liberation” (Harrison 1991: 10). One of the key interventions of Faye Harrison’s landmark edited volume Decolonizing Anevelop an anthropology based in the “critical intellecmonic struggles of Third World peoples” (1991: 1), and thus most of the collected essays focused on the Caribbean
#OURLIVESMATTER 7
and Latin America, particularly because it was published at a time when the tides of both political insurgence and repression were high in the region. P rogressive Dystopia at tempts to apply the insights and imperatives of decolonial anthropology to the unhyphenated Black US context, to those of us stuck stateside with no flag of our own to wave among the Labor Day throngs on Eastern Parkway.*
For Harrison, decolonial anthropology is all the more urgent because Black diasporic nations like Jamaica have achieved “sovereignty without emancipatory substance” (2008: 243), as they continue to bear the weight of neoliberal-cum-neocolonial dispossession. Critical anthropological engagement across the African diaspora has taken up the struggle to make good on the promises of the anti-imperial independence movements of the last half-cent ury, particularly as the gains of nationhood are unevenly distributed across axes of difference (Pierre 2012; Smith 2016; Thomas 2005, 2011; Williams 1996). Black people descended from slaves held in the US have almost the inverse predicament: we have won the prize of legal emancipation without access to meaningful sovereignty. US statecraft unfolded seam lessly before and after the nonevent of 1863, trapping Black and indigenous communities within the borders of a settler country that thrives on ou r d ispossession. Because of this, Harrison’s intervention of an “anthropology for liberation” in the Black US context may necessitate a focus on su rviving the ends of settler states instead of, or at least prior to, the struggles of independent ones. Abolitionist anthropology transposes the analytic choreography of decolonial anthropology onto the late liberal US: one more time from the top, this time on the right foot. Though the US is often skipped over in discussions of postcoloniality, it was the first nation to throw off the yoke of European dominance, only to fasten it onto the necks of enslaved Africans. The ongoing settler-colonial genocide of indigenous people and the sublimation of African people into
* Every Labor Day, the West Indian Day Parade marches on Eastern Parkway, a broad thoroughfare that bisects Brooklyn, New York. Over a million revelers attend, most of whom carry small flags from any one of dozens of Caribbean countries and colonies, or are festooned from head to toe in their national colors. None of these flags fly freely—each is weighed down by the contradictions of postcolonial nationalism in the context of ongoing political struggle over structural adjustment, heteropatriarchal power structures, and exclusionary domestic and foreign policy. Still, I wish I had one—the wish is a longing for sovereignty neverto-come. For more on Black politics beyond the shadow of sovereignty, see Non-
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Black objects through chattel slavery are twin structures upholding US sociality. Rather than being exceptional to the US, abolitionist scholarship is rooted in diasporic Africana studies, as is the dream of abolition itself: Haiti was the first decolonial nation in the world, which fought off both slavery and empire at the same time, and has been punished ever since. Twinned with attention to Haiti, there is a particularly rich ethnographic corpus examining gender, activism, and antiblack state violence in Brazil (Alves 2018; Perr y 2013; Smith 2016). Much of the Black anthropological canon is already oriented toward abolition (cf. Bolles 2001; Buck 2001; Cox 2015; Drake and Baber 1990; Gwaltney 1993; McClaurin 2001; Thomas 2013a, 2013b; Williams 1996), and I use the term “abolitionist anthropology” to lift up this scholarly genealogy and my relation to it.
Antecedent to its location as a disciplinary mode, abolitionist anthropology is a genre of Black study. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. . . . The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present” (Moten and Harney 2013: 110).
The “speculative practice” of study as sketched here is immediately recognizable to any ethnographer: we call it fieldwork. For anthropologists of Black people in the Americas, that fieldwork is never completely out of sight of another set of fields cotton, cane, tobacco, rice. Our real-time i s stitched together from “plantation futures” (McKittrick 2013), a variegated timespace called forth from the hold of the ship, the social life that animates the socially dead (Patterson 1982). This mode of heterotemporal study, then, also invokes the speculative practice of Black science fiction writers like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and N. K. Jemisin, whose willingness to dream other worlds inspires my rendering of this one.
If, as Sharpe posits, “the question for theory is how to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, the afterlife of property, how, in short, to inhabit and rupture this episteme with their, with our, knowable lives” (2016: 50), a n abolitionist anthropology finds its answers in the register of the quotidian, in the cruddy, ordinary facts of blackness (Povinelli 2011; Fanon 1967). Though I do not seek to make Black lives “knowable” as Sharpe suggests, given the tendency toward hubris that swells under the skin of thick Progressive Dystopia offers a few glimpses of Bay Area blackness as it “inhabit[s] and rupture[s] this episteme” of late liberalism. Significant, here, is the dyadic relation between inhabiting (living), and
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rupturing (destruction): the syncopation, or “two-step,” 7 between the present durative tense of Black survivance and the future perfect of abolition. In th i s sense, abolitionist anthropology is in rhythm with what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the “sociology of potentiality” (2011: 16) while still getting down on The One of endurance.8 Progressive Dystopia is an attempt to engage anthropology as a practice of abolition, an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Sucka Free City.9
Abolition is not a synonym for resistance; it encompasses the ways in which Black people and our accomplices work within, against, and beyond the state in the service of collective liberation. As an analytic, abolition demands specificity the very kinds of granularity that ethnography offers as an accounting of the daily practices that facilitate Black material and symbolic death. Abolitionist anthropology, then, is an ethic and a scholarly mode that attends to the interface between the multisited anti-Black state and those who seek to survive it. In the process of unthinking the state, abolitionist anthropology joins two generations of attempts to reconceive a disciplinary project built on extractive logics, collusion, antiblackness, and colonialism. Emerging from deep relationality with ancestors and contemporaries, its practice is a mode of reparative caring that seeks to be accountable to what is unaccounted for in social reform schemes. This book is not a manual for how to be a better, more radical anthropologist. I offer it only as a provocation to care more than we can know, to extend our analyses past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it.
As a methodology, abolitionist anthropology has resonance with the broad rubric of engaged anthropology, which seeks to transform the discipline’s “inside baseball” reputation by inciting a broader conversation about the world as it is, and sometimes, as it should be. The boundaries and delineations of engaged anthropology are contested, but included are the interconnected fields of public, applied, and activist anthropologies. Public a nth ropology often refers to high-minded but accessible engagement with current events largely through journalism and mass media, while applied anthropology is often, but not always, carried out for a client and proposes concrete solutions for concrete (and discrete) problems. In contrast, activist anthropologists study social movements and conduct ethnographic work that is accountable to the vision of those movements (Hale 2006). Each of these anthropological modes makes a unique intervention in the field, e distinctions between them help tune our attention to the varied interface between the practice of anthropology and the state. Because the late ral state is an unruly set of overlapping processes, our attendant modes
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of intellectual and political practice must also be agile as they target civil society and the free market as cognates of the state.
Echoing the multilingual harmony that sings through the sidewalks of San Francisco, I layer Black English, neighborhood dialects, and academic prose into the ethnographic text.10 I am inspired by Aimee Cox’s assertion that the social choreography of Black girls “can disrupt and discredit normative reading practices that assess young Black women’s bodies as undesirable, dangerous, captive, or out of place” (2015: 28 – 29). I n the pages of this book, I attempt to disrupt normative writing practices and dance a Black girl text to keep the narrative conventions of our discipline on their toes. I braid together three thematic arguments, which I outline in the following sections.
Progressive Dystopia
As the first organizing theme, I figure San Francisco as a progressive dystopia, a perpetually colonial place that reveals both the possibilities and li m its of the late liberal imaginary. In the current national climate, “progressive” has come to mean anyone to the left of the Democratic Party plat form. The term can reference an incredibly diverse group of communities and individuals, some of whom have conflicting political imaginaries. For i n stance, Robeson as a school has an explicitly anti-American, decolonial vision.† In contrast, the Congressional Progressive Caucus lauds the “progressive promise” as a patriotic duty. Their 2016 “The People’s Budget” platform reveals the allegiances inherent to their brand of progressivism: “Prosperity, Not Austerity: Invest in America” (c P c 2016). In this text, I use “progressive” to reference both the redistributive ideal and contests over how to realize it.
† An example of how this decolonial impulse played out at Robeson was the day the school moved into its current building, taking over the top floor of a middle school that had been open for thirty years. When the staff gathered for a planning meeting in the auditorium, a grandmotherly Spanish teacher who had lived through the Noriega years in Panama, climbed up and unhooked the huge American flag that hung on one side of the stage, next to the flag of the state of California. “Should we burn it?” she asked. The staff voted not to burn it, and instead put it in a box in a storage closet, but the fact that the staff voted on it in the first place is an indication of the Robeson’s skeptical relationship to the American project, at least in the school’s early institutional years.
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The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s “progressive promise” framework signals the inherently utopian nature of the reformist endeavor, oriented as it is toward the recuperation of the American dream. To highlight t he social conditions produced when the progressive promise is broken (or perhaps it was always already broken), I use the framework of dystopia, conventionally imagined as a fictional world that is considerably worse than, yet u ncomfortably close to, one’s own. Like utopia, dystopia is also suffused with futurity, but weighted toward a negative valence that can produce anger, fear, hope, or complacency vis-à-vis the present. In Economies of Abandonment, Povinelli (2011) drafts science fiction foremother Ursula K. Le Gu i n as an intellectual collaborator, and uses the latter’s short story “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” as the impetus for her exploration of tense and eventfulness in late liberalism. I also engage speculative fiction as an anthropological resource, and look to Black science fiction icon Octavia Butler as a compass in rendering the progressive dystopia.
Writ ten twenty-five years ago, Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) is set in a California that is not postapocalyptic per se, in that there has been no single earth-shattering event like a permanent eclipse, and yet the social world has crumbled in the ruins of more mundane violence. The novel’s protagonist is Lauren Olamina, a young Black girl the same age as several Robeson students featured in this text. Indeed, in the fictional narrative, Lauren was born in 2009, the same year I began graduate study to work on this project. Over the course of the book, Lauren leads a ragtag, multiracial group of survivors on a sojourn from the Los Angeles suburbs to a sma l l town in Northern California, figuring out a way to live after the end of their world. The postapocalyptic frame is not hyperbolic for Black and indigenous people in the Americas, the apocalypse came and never left, resulting in the dystopian reality of those of us enduring settler colonialism in the wake of chattel slavery (TallBear 2016). Far from fantastic, Parable of the Sower (and its sequel, Parable of the Talents) is thus instructive in helping marginalized communities imagine a futurity that is not hitched to the cont inuation of the status quo.
Though speculative fiction is central to Afrofuturist practice in its capacity to creatively envision Black utopias, I tie it here to dystopia and death.11 Rather than an opposition, the utopic/dystopic impulse is a symbiotic dyad distinguished only by emphasis. “Utopia and dystopia in practice to test the boundaries of reality: the former approaches an ideal but ped by the real world and the latter makes visible various breaking points and vulnerabilities” (Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash
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2010: 6). Where utopia claps on the 1 and the 3, dystopia claps on the 2 and the 4. Both orientations belong in the rhythm section of what Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown call visionary fiction, “a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power” (Imarisha 2015: 4).
But Frisco ain’t fiction it’s a steel-and-soot city filled with flesh-andblood folks. What does it mean to read and write it as a dystopia, traditionally understood as an imagined rather than “real” place?12 In their work to think across history and speculative fiction, Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash assert that dystopia is a practice that extends beyond the fictional genre into the realm of lived experience: “Utopia, dystopia, chaos: these are not just ways of imagining the future (or the past) but can also be understood as concrete practices through which historically situated actors seek to reimagine their present and transform it into a plausible future” (2010: 3). An anthropological practice of dystopia demands that we stretch the range of our imagining beyond past and future to land squarely in the present, as we engage actors who are not only historically, but also socially and politically situated in their cultural contexts. In this sense, I practice dystopia on two scales: while this book is a dystopian text that labors to “[make] visible various breaking points and vulnerabilities” of late liberalism, I also argue that San Francisco is itself a concrete dystopia (Varsam 2003), one that provides the material basis that animates fictional texts like Parable of the Sower.
Just as utopias are pedagogical tools that educate our desires, dystopian practice provides an “education of perception” (Varsam 2003: 209), one that attunes us to death, dispossession, and disposability as codices to interpret reality. Crucially, a focus on social and material death is not just hateration‡ for its own sake, but instead an attempt to challenge life as the only possible site of political valorization. If, as Jared Sexton suggests, “a politics of abolition could never finally be a politics of resurgence, recovery, or recuperation. It cou ld only ever begin with degeneration, decline, or dissolution” (2014: 11),
‡ Brought into popular parlance by r& b legend Mary J. Blige’s 2001 single “Family Affair,” “hateration” derives in part from the term “player-hating” and is a concerted effort to delegitimize another Black person’s joy. In informal intellectual circles, Afropessimists like Sexton are derided as haters because they seek to center death and dying in Black theory, but a more generous reading suggests that they are attempting to hate the game rather than the player.
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then dystopian narratives are key to constructing just such a politics. Abolition starts at the end of the world, and just like Lauren Olamina, Black folks in Frisco have a lot to teach us about how to survive the apocalypse.
Dystopia is also suffused with notions of place its ut terance invokes a where (here) and a when (now). The trouble is that blackness is perpetually out of place, and constantly running out of t ime (Audre told us we was “never meant to survive,” remember?).13 The Bayview, Hunters Point, the Excelsior, the Moe all of t hese neighborhoods are spatial coordinates of Black San Francisco, but “they are not where blackness comes from. There is no from. There is no there, or somewhere, or place that a black from is anchored to” (McKittrick 2017: 97). This unmooredness, “the fantastic nowhere of blackness” across the Americas is as close to an ontogeny as we gon na get, and it “allows us to puzzle out new and unexpected and und isciplined and unacceptable modes of being human” (McKittrick 2017: 99). Blackness is a topography without a territory, and by naming Frisco as a Black geography, I am not trying to solve the riddle of Black place, or to affix blackness to a seven-mile-squa re patch of hills on the Pacific coast. I invoke it as a way to spatialize the encounter between cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) and antiblack state violence. The state of California is a primary site of this collision. Critical geographer Ruthie Gilmore calls it the Golden Gulag (2007) because of its incongruous melding of ostentation and incarceration. Robeson in turn provides a concentrically nested instance of this phenomenon, in that its practices of exclusion as an overtly “radical” space reverberate with the exodus of Black people and people of color from the official “sanctuary city” of San Francisco.
Carceral Progressivism
As a second overarching theme, I offer the concept of carceral progressivism to illuminate the paradoxical dynamic in which social reform practices, particularly those that target inequities in communities of color, can per petuate antiblack racism even as they seek to eliminate it. We might recognize this as a sort of “cunning” of multiracial liberalism, whereby the acknowledgement of systemic injustice serves as an alibi for the retrenchment of that very system (Povinelli 2002). If the landscape is a progressive opia, then carceral progressivism is a key way to move material and disit is a routing and rerouting of power through the uneven, interlocked mechanisms of the state, private funders,
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and civil society. “Carceral” in this sense refers not primarily to the state of being currently imprisoned or detained, but to the “carceral continuum” conceptualized by Loïc Wacquant (2000) as the circuit between the ghetto and the prison, relayed in large part by the punitive system of social welfare. Carceral progressives lament the systemic racism of the penal system, only to call upon police as collaborators in protecting their vision of com munity. More broadly, carceral progressivism is critical of capitalism, but not its enforcement, and seeks redistribution, not reparations. Carceral progressivism functions as a pinnacle of efficiency for late liberal statecraft because the discursive narratives (e.g., liberation) and material gains (e.g., a justice-themed public high school) of redistributive social movements are cannibalized and repurposed as rationales for dispossession.
In schools, carcerality is most often viewed through the lens of the schoolto-prison pipeline, whereby zero-tolerance-style disciplinary policies disproportionately impact students of color, resulting in their arrest, detention, and eventual imbrication in the prison system. In contrast, Robeson Justice Academy pours immense resources into avoiding the school-to-prison pipeline through restorative justice and democratic practices, and yet still reenacts the logics of Black punition and disposability by counseling young people to transfer out of the school and criminalizing the border between the school and the neighborhood. In the current national climate, scholars and activists are faced with a Manichean divide between friends on the left and foes on the right, whereby the former are invested in ending mass incarceration, and the latter in a law-and-order future. But what happens when both sides of the struggle for control over state resources rely on the same common sense of Black captivity? The marginalization of Black staff, students, and families at Robeson is an instantiation of how racialized carceral logic has stretched beyond literal confinement to shape the practice of social justice movements. As a framework, carceral progressivism brings our attention to the continuities between racism and antiracism, allowing us to disentangle intention from impact, and disrupt right/left dichotomies that can obscure emergent political worlds in places like southeast San Francisco.
Willful Defiance
The final theme advanced in this book is willful defiance, which I use to trace the agentic flows that creatively adapt to and subvert the terms of carceral progressivism, exposing its incoherencies and fissures. The phrase
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“willful defiance” originates in the California Board of Education disciplinary code, and I choose to repurpose state language as part of my analytic fra mework as a way to highlight how marginalized communities adapt the odds and ends of restrictive mechanisms as tools for survivance (Vizenor 2008). “Willful,” too, invokes Sara Ahmed’s work on the willful subject and its capacity to thwart liberal sovereignty. For Ahmed, willfulness is “what gets in the way of what is on the way. . . . To be judged willful is to become a killjoy of the future: the one who steals the possibility of happiness” (2014: 47). In the progressive dystopia, the will is that which pulls against the inevitability of social justice and robs the imminent reformed and antiracist state of its legitimacy. Rather than trying to fix upon the ontology of a willful subject, Ahmed instead traces the effects of that willfulness. Like her, I a sk not “What is willfulness?” but “What is willfulness doing ?” and offer an anthropological response to her philosophical question.
When faced with the chicanery of the nonprofit-industrial complex, Black employees and clients of Robeson willfully defy the constraints placed upon them, and are sometimes punished with expulsion from both the literal school space and from belonging to the just polity it anticipates building. Audra Simpson’s (2014) attention to form and voice as sites of illiberal sovereignty helps us perceive willfulness as a mode of abolition. Rather than read willful defiance as what she calls the “easy answer” (Simpson 2016: 333) of political resistance, or as a transparently liberatory project, I argue that it is better understood as a practice of Black refusal that not only rejects the political, but challenges the legitimacy of the state and its effects. By operating outside the frame of formalized protests like #OurLivesMatter (or even #BlackLivesMatter), willful defiance sours the legitimizing function of civil disobedience, and offers a grammar to speak a world beyond the state. Like the Cali proverb “Fuck tha police,” willful defiance is an abolitionist ethos that privileges the necessary over the possible. Over the course of this text, I share stories that illustrate the relationship between willful defiance and carceral progressivism, and how each escapes the grasp of the other as they flow through the geography of a progressive dystopia.
Frisco Methods
You can stand at the corner of Twenty-Second and Capp in the Mission District while dozens of white tech workers stroll past toting compostable coffee cups and Timbuktu bags and still feel the tug of La Misión, the neigh-
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borhood built by the cultural and political labor of generations of Latinx families, y todavía sobreviviendo in a deferential head nod here, a Los Bukis chorus wafting out of a second-floor w indow there. The old San Francisco and the new San Francisco are laid up on top of theyselves, an urban pal i mpsest where social geographies chafe against each other to produce The City.14 Just as Frisco is always peeking around the edges of gentrification, this formal ethnographic monograph teeters atop the foundation of sociopolitical relations that precede it. (“Frisco,” here, is not a synonym for “San Francisco,” though their geographic boundaries are coterminous it’s a contested name for the city at the center of this study, jarring for some and heartwarming for others, used mostly by working-class folks, Black folks, and people of color in the Bay Area and throughout California. I use Frisco intentionally. Appearing without scare quotes or the italics of impending translation, Frisco dislodges the inherited logics of propriety in The City, and is a strategy that privileges the social lexicon of the key participants in this project.)
I worked at Robeson for six years bae (before academic era) I came of age as an educator and as an activist in The City. My political commitments have been indelibly shaped by born-and-bred Bay folks who welcomed a mouthy East Coast rap kid to their turf and their struggle. Progressive Dystopia i s, among other things, an attempt to be accountable to those commit ments in the practice of academic knowledge production. Methodologically, that meant developing a corpus of data grounded in the political economy of the new San Francisco while still epistemically privileging Frisco kids of all ages.
I am keenly aware of my presence as a guest in the Sucka Free City, and I offer this brief sketch of my fieldwork process not as a credential to prove my expertise, but to make plain the “how” of a Black feminist ethnography. I conducted formal fieldwork over the span of seven years, 2010 – 16. Prior to that, I was a program coordinator, college counselor, and classroom teacher at Robeson, and thus, the social and political entanglements informing my research reach back to the institution’s opening year in 2003. I began data collection in the summer of 2010, conducting initial interviews with veteran community activists and former Robeson students in the Bay Area. I returned for a three-week pilot research trip a year later in 2011, and attended the weeklong professional development and orientation for Robeson teachers. Because of a wave of fiscal austerity at the state level in California that , Robeson did not have a final budget in time for the start of school that August, and could not hire any auxiliary personnel, including office or secu-
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rity staff. For the first two weeks of school, I served as a volunteer “student advisor,” the revamped title for Robeson’s security staff, keeping a walkietalk ie on me and making sure students cleared out from the corner store in the morning and got to class in a relatively timely fashion. The most intensive period of fieldwork began the following year, when I spent another summer of community research and the full 2012 – 13 academic year at Robeson. During that time, I conducted just under fifty individual interviews, five focus groups, and a schematic data analysis of a wide set of curricular, bureaucratic, and legislative documents impacting Robeson. I also volunteered that year as a part-time classroom teacher offering two arts electives, an advisory course, and a spring yoga intersession (not to mention providing fifty-leven rides home). Afterward I conducted follow-up research trips in the fall of 2013, the spring of 2015, and the spring of 2016. Enumerated here, the sum of these discrete periods of data collection don’t add up to my psychic and political investment in The City, but I include the calculations here like scratch paper stapled to the back of an exam just to show my work.
When Winning Is Losing: The Structure of the Book
Progressive Dystopia examines seven concrete progressive “wins” in the context of Robeson Justice Academy and their relative cost to Black Frisco residents: the “Hands up, don’t shoot” mobilization of youth of color to protest police brutality, the defeat of a proposed surveillance program, the practice of antiracist pedagogy in a Spanish classroom, a cultural competence training to address racial disparities in discipline, the push out of authoritarian teachers, and a Black and Brown solidarity event in response to a racial brawl. Attention to successful reforms allows me to celebrate and name the material changes that are happening in the lives of Black children and children of color in Frisco. However, both the temporal catharsis of the “win” and the exhausting labor of service provision serve to domesticate our freedom dreams within the realm of what’s possible, rather than what’s necessary. The educators and staff at Robeson Justice Academy and at similar antiracist educational institutions across the US are doing the incredibly inspiring work of providing culturally competent, engaging, and democratically oriented direct service they a re winning because they are enacting the cenario for surviving late liberalism. The chapters that follow sketch these scenarios and shadow the crew of malcontents who peep that
CHAPTER ONE
In “ ‘A Long History of Seeing’: Historicizing the Progressive Dystopia,” I recount the attempted takeover of the governing council of Robeson Justice Academy by elite white gentrifiers, and the tension between Robeson’s social justice mission and state-mandated democratic bureaucracy. I describe San Francisco as a progressive dystopia, a perpetually colonial place that marks the frontier of both the national imagination and the late liberal project. As a lens into the political economy of San Francisco, I trace the history of racialized dispossession in the city from the massacre of indigenous Ohlone people, through the settlement and displacement of Asian American, Latinx, and Black communities. Using the frame of “militant liberalism” (Hanhardt 2013), I position Robeson as a key battlefield in the long fight between neoliberalism and progressivism in the revanchist city the latter won this skirmish, but not without ceding territory to the New San Francisco.
In the third chapter, “ ‘Why Can’t We Learn African?’: Academic Pathways, Coalition Pedagogy, and the Demands of Abolition,” I use a Beginning Spanish classroom as a lens into the “progressive” side of the paradox of carceral progressivism. Across the US, austerity measures have dealt dead ly blows to social services, particularly health care and education. In the midst of school closures in Black and Latinx neighborhoods and the aggressive rise of standardized tests as a coercive tool, Robeson’s social justice curriculum makes it an aberration in the state education system. By attending to the differential practice of form and content in Robeson’s classrooms, I conceptualize Robeson here as both a strategy and a site of struggle. To illuminate the former, I discuss the practice of coalition pedagogy, where instructors successfully use examples of multiracial coalition to combat what Christina Sharpe (2016) calls the “weather” of antiblackness. On the latter, I lift up moments where this sincerely antiracist curricular content is challenged by Black students who critique the scope of its impact, revealing the antagonism between antiracism and abolition.
Chapter 4, “The Kids in the Hall: Space and Governance in Frisco’s Plantation Futures,” centers on a staff meeting in which Robeson leadership tries to use critical race scholarship to help teachers manage student behavior. By attending to discourse among students and teachers about the hallways, I surface the overlapping geographies of the plantation and the colonial settlement, and map the contemporary school space as contiguous with these s of confinement and expulsion. Throughout the chapter, I draw on the work of Saidiya Hartman (1997) and Katherine McKittrick (2013) to trace the afterlife of slavery at Robeson as it manifests in the links between Recon-
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struction-era approaches and reactions to the policing of Black comport and the management of hallway behavior in the school site. Finally, I follow the flight of the settled/slave toward what we might call a Frisco fugitivity, one that stays on the move within and away from the carceral city.
Can you get kicked out of a revolution? The fifth chapter, “Ordinary Departures: Flesh, Bodies, and Border Management at Robeson” ponders this quer y in relation to how Robeson manages dissent within the institution. During my fieldwork, two right-wing (read: liberal) nonblack teachers quit their teaching jobs, in part due to pressure from school leadership. Over the same period of time, several Black girls were asked to transfer out because of behavior concerns. I read institutional discourse around one such student, Tarika, which positions her as a “loud” troublemaker ill fitted for the school, to highlight the linkages between performances of social class, race, and obedience. Tarika is dismissed as a “Sunnydale girl” because she lives in a particular housing project, and I connect her expulsion from Robeson to the broader exclusion of Black girlhood from the boundaries of the citizenhuma n. While the win is clear the problematic teachers left! the wave of fanfare and farewells that attends departing teachers disorients those of us who might miss a Black girl like Tarika, whose normative absence renders her expulsion a nonevent.
The sixth chapter, “Black Skin, Brown Masks: Carceral Progressivism and the Co-optation of Xicanx Nationalism” centers on a racially charged brawl between Black and Latinx students, and subsequent communitybased efforts toward reconciliation. I uncover the way policing and punition form the foundation of the carceral progressivism that undergirds this iteration of multiracial coalition. First, I examine an impromptu mediation in the coprincipals’ office as a lens into the relationship between gender and race as primary markers of belonging. I then shift to a Town Hall meeting convened in response to the fight as a lens into the web of contradictory narratives that characterizes the terrain of left-of-center struggles in the Bay Area and beyond. In a cruelly parasitic move, the carceral progressive institution mobilizes Xicanismo as an antiblack state strategy, foreclosing both the liberatory impulse of Aztlán’s cultural nationalism and the institutional pledge of sanctuary for Black children in The City by the Bay. Ultimately, the exclusion of Black young people from the institutions founded to ser ve them belies the promise of state-funded progressivism in late lib-
al chapter, “My Afterlife Got Afterlives,” is a sort of coda that examines the ways that this research project has been taken up by those
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whose lives animate it. Returning to the photograph that opens the book, I recount a school leader’s deployment of an early essay of mine as a strategy to thwart Black political mobilization at Robeson. In a sense, his use of the ethnographic text as part of his leadership practice is a huge success for critical anthropology this i s what we want, right? For folks to read and apply our work in the “real world?” However, his bad-fait h citation practice reveals the risks of such engagement, and I juxtapose his use of the ethnographic text with a range of reactions from the participants who have read dra f ts of these chapters and responded with joy, doubt, and indifference. I examine how these recirculations of the work mirror the possibilities and limits of social movement work within the context of carceral progressivism, as well as the caveats embedded in the practice of anthropology of and as abolition.
At the 2014 convening of the Movement for Black Lives in Cleveland, there was an almost constant musical presence in the courtyards and on the street corners surrounding the conference events that attracted hundreds of Black organizers, educators, and cultural workers from across the US. Various chants and songs were shared across regions and generations, and each cipher culminated with this infectious refrain: “I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win!,” sung at the top of our lungs as we jumped up and down or variously wiggled our body parts in rhythm with our faith in Black life. I believe that we will win is an abolitionist mantra that conjures a course to freedom. Its utterance is an affirmation of Black autonomy and in the context of a gathering that centered prison abolitionists and Black land activists, I believe that we will win is a ritual practice of internalizing the necessity to do the impossible. While the #OurLivesMatter photo that opens this chapter issues from the same impulse to preserve Black life, it redirects the rage of young people to the realm of the doable: arrest the officer, don’t shoot unarmed civilians, protect Black and Brown youth from state execution. By focusing on the incremental rollout of revolutionary programing, the everyday practice of progressive reformers in places like Robeson Justice Academy is tethered to the temporality of success look at what we won. Progressive Dystopia maps the tension between these two tenses of victory, and amplifies the lessons Frisco fugitives have for us as we dream an impossible world in which their lives do, in fact, matter.
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Notes
Chapter One
#OurLivesMatter
1 All of the institutional and individual names in this manuscript are pseudonyms.
2 Though American Anthropological Association style guidelines stipulate the use of lowercase “black,” I capitalize “Black” in order to signal orthographically the specificity of the racial condition of Black people. I do not capitalize “blackness” as a state of being, blackening, or any other derivative terminology because those words are more capacious and permeable than the ascription of “Black.”
3 “L atinx” is a gender-neutral descriptor, pronounced “La-teen-ex,” that is an alternative to “Latina/o.” The ending “x” is an intervention of feminist and queer cultural workers as a form of linguistic resistance to the binary gendering of the Spanish language. Earlier neologisms included “Latin@,” but with the advent of “@” being used as a key command in online spaces, new adaptations were required. For more on the racial and political implications of the “x,” see Jessica Marie Johnson’s “Thinking about the ‘X’ ” (2015).
4 The relationship between appropriation, solidarity, and co-opt ation was a subject of many online and offline clashes within overlapping Bay Area leftist communities. A public event was even convened at the shoe store – cu m – ar ts venue SoleSpace in Oakland in order to host a public dialogue between Black and Latinx activists to discuss when, if, and how “Brown Lives Matter” was a problematic political framing. For more nuanced critique of the various permutations of the Black Lives Matter framework, see cofounder Alicia Garza’s “A Herstory of the #Black-
caffolding for apprehending late liberalism, my work is in long-form dialogue with Elizabeth Povinelli and her moves toward an anthropology
6 Ha rtman’s work (1997, 2007, 2008, 2016) is capacitated by Hortense Spillers’s oeuvre spilling forth from “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), which also makes possible the interventions of a community of scholars of antiblackness (James 2007, 2013; Keeling 2007; Sexton 2008; Sharpe 2016; Spillers 1987, 2003; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2010).
7 John L. Jackson Jr., in his seminar courses at Penn, often used the heuristic of a “two-step” as an embodied mode of reading across and against intellectual and political tradition.
8 The One is the bass groove that capacitates funk as a form: as Funkadelic’s (1978) incantation goes, we are “getting down on The One / which we believe in.” L. H. Stallings connects The One to the embodiment of racial and sexual liberation: “Everyone has to get down on The One” (2015: 103). For more on The One and its relevance to funk aesthetics and the capacity for Black life lived otherwise, see LaMonda H. Stallings’s Funk the Erotic (2015).
9 One of San Francisco’s many racialized aliases is the Sucka Free City, named both for the “sfc ” initials of San Francisco City and County, and for the pride of city residents who reject the postcard-perfect image of their home. The moniker has gained traction, and is the name of the major weekly newspaper’s local politics blog, as well as the title of a 2004 Spike Lee film (Sucker Free City).
10 My u se of Black English as an academic and theoretical language is inspired by the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston. I am also inspired by the interventions of Xicana feminism, particularly works by Gloria Anzaldúa. See, for example, her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Borderlands/ La Frontera (1987).
11 “A frofuturism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future” (Miller 2009: 20). Sun Ra, Erykah Badu, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler are often cited as practitioners. For a fuller portrait of Afrofuturist practice, see Womack 2013.
12 In conventional literary criticism, a dystopia refers to “a non-ex istent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (Sargent 1994: 9).
13 Lorde 1978, 32.
14 “T he City” is a colloquial term for the city of San Francisco that is used uncontroversially by locals across axes of class, race, and municipality of residence. The term is also used in contrast to “The Town,” a nickname for Oakland with a slightly more melanated connotation.
TO CHAPTER ONE of the otherwise (2006, 2011, 2016), while also informed by Saba Mahmood’s (2005) critique of secular Western feminism’s narrow perception of the political.
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